You can tell a lot about a man by how he apologises for assaulting a woman. That’s a good rule of thumb, ladies. Feel free to embroider it about your person. Some men beg for sympathy. Some insist that it was no biggie. And some make the perennially favoured point that the woman was to blame. According to the Very Rev Frances Ward,
David Ruffley, the Conservative MP for Bury St Edmunds, did all three.

“I heard your lengthy justification and defence of yourself, but I think I need to question your version of events,” Ward
wrote in a letter to the MP
that was published this week. “You tried to convince me that in the ‘incident’ back in March there was blame on both sides. I cannot let you try to tell me that it was only ‘a little local incident’ or that [Ruffley’s now ex-partner] was at fault. I must remind you of the seriousness of the assault and that you were arrested, not her.”

Indeed, this assault was so serious that it left Ruffley’s ex-partner “wincing in obvious pain” when her friend Ward saw her afterwards. And yet it occurred over four months ago and would probably never have been known to the wider public had Ward, the
first female dean at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, not written her letter.

Ruffley, sensing a belated explanation to the public was in order,
issued one
through his lawyers this week, again ticking many of the cliche boxes to an extent that his statement would have felt almost cosy – warm and fuzzy, even – were it not for the fact it was describing common assault. There were euphemisms (“an incident”, “an inappropriate action on my part”); there were vague and reassuring references to the woman (“she has accepted my apology”); and there were mind-your-own-business obfuscations (“a deeply personal business”).

He then ended with a
solemn statement, strangely in the conditional tense, that he “would never condone domestic violence under any circumstances”. There was, notably, no mention of whether he felt that accepting a police caution for common assault – an admission, in other words, that he had assaulted someone – in any way conflicted with his position as a member of parliament.

So yes, you can tell a lot about a man by how he apologises for assaulting a woman. You can also tell a lot about an industry by how it reacts to one of its own assaulting a woman. A Conservative party spokesman
told the BBC
that “the matter” had been “dealt with by [the police] at the time”. In other words, the poor chap has suffered enough – what’s your problem? (Can we all just take a moment to remind ourselves that the Conservatives are in government?)

But then, this reaction comes as no real surprise from a party that has overseen the
slashing of budgets
for charities and services for women who have suffered domestic abuse and violence. David Cameron announced this afternoon that he was looking “very seriously” into the idea of domestic violence as a specific crime – without making reference to the fact that someone in his party had done just that. It would be nice if one could believe for even a second that the party in power gives the slightest fig about women being beaten up, what with
two women a week being killed
in England and Wales by their current or former partner.

I’m going to make a little supposition here and suggest that the more male‑dominated an industry, the less of a toss it gives about domestic violence. (It is worth remembering that the person who brought Ruffley’s “incident” to national attention was a woman.)

Think of all the various sports stars whose propensity for beating up their wives and girlfriends was deemed not worth disrupting their glittering careers for. On Thursday, in the US,
the NFL announced
that the Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, who earlier this year slugged his then-fiancee, Janay Palmer, and then dragged her apparently unconscious body out of a lift, should be suspended for two games and fined $58,000. To give some context, Ray earns $7m a season – so $58,000 will cause him significantly less pain than he caused Palmer – and the NFL gave a four-game suspension to a player caught using an infertility drug and a year’s suspension to another for smoking marijuana. So now women know precisely how seriously the NFL takes the abuse of them. And the answer is, half as seriously as it does infertility drugs.

Ruffley, by contrast, hasn’t even been suspended – even though, as a politician, one might think that personal integrity was of greater importance than it is in a footballer. Seeing as the man himself seems to be all but incapable of uttering the word that defines what he did, it seems unlikely that he will be able to state the bleedingly obvious: that his position is untenable.

The Conservative party is reportedly “discussing his future”. We’ll see if it has the courage of the Church of England to state that men who assault women have no place in parliament.